For Students

LEAP prepares students to be industry leaders in STEM.

As a LEAP participant, you can strengthen your academic experience by collaborating with faculty mentors from the colleges of Business, Engineering, and Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Your assigned project will blend concepts and skills from STEM and business fields, providing experiential learning on the economic aspects of research-based industry projects.

Benefits of being a LEAP student include:

  • A stipend 
  • Mentorship from academia and industry
  • Community building across STEM disciplines

Learning with LEAP

Participants will be coached to advance projects from concept to reality and have access to business and compliance officers. You will receive mentoring to develop and implement a business action plan, which will include a project cost-effectiveness analysis and business improvement techniques.

A business advisor will assist with:

  • Project timeline and expectations
  • Selecting decision-making tools
  • Sensitivity analysis, and
  • Diagnostics.

LEAP students will be trained on Responsible and Ethical Conduct of Research (RECR), mandated under the federal COMPETES Act and deemed critical by the National Science Foundation. LEAP projects will teach a “culture of compliance” and use a systematic approach to follow applicable laws, regulations, best practices, and standards.

Projects will maintain: 

  • Respect and compliance with the law
  • Highest standards of academic integrity
  • Respect for the rights and dignity of others  
  • Accurate records; and
  • Concern for health and safety.

You will learn risk-based approaches to assess, prioritize, and mitigate compliance risks; communication, education and training; and annual and periodic monitoring.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, your safety is our utmost priority as we partner with industry to develop non-experimental projects aligned with the growing areas of statistics and data analysis, theoretical modeling and simulation, computational studies, and computer programming. 

Take the LEAP today to become a future STEM industry leader!